Angela Carella: 'Hats off' to city leaders for obeying the law

Published 1:01 am, Wednesday, February 19, 2014

You can get a headache trying to follow the logic of the "secret meetings."

No one knows how long ago they began, but for what likely is decades Stamford's elected leaders have met privately once a month with the mayor and members of his administration.

Only the eight leaders of the Board of Representatives attended. The remaining 32 representatives were not invited. No meeting dates were posted. There was no agenda. No minutes were kept.

We're not talking about anything important, leaders said. We're just "taking care of administrative matters," "streamlining the agenda," "getting rid of all the weeds," they said. To make government work, leaders have to speak in private, they said. Trust us, they said.

And people did -- until 2011, when a former city representative who was not a leader, Sal Gabriele, brought the leaders before the state Freedom of Information Commission. Besides the closed-door meetings, leaders were doing city business by telephone and email, Gabriele charged.

You are acting as a committee, Gabriele challenged the leaders. So you have to follow FOI law. You have to post your meeting dates, meet in public and keep minutes.

No, we don't, the leaders said. We don't vote on anything. We're not a committee. We're just leaders getting things organized.

During his challenge Gabriele did not file some paperwork in time, and the FOI Commission dismissed his complaint.

In 2012 the former head of the Board of Finance, Joe Tarzia, again brought the leaders before the FOI Commission. The commissioners dismissed Tarzia's complaint, too, saying he did not file it within the allotted time.

So the FOI Commission never debated whether the actions of Stamford's elected leaders are legal.

In 2013, a weird thing happened. Democrats in the state Senate proposed Bill 1148. Senate Democrats would not say who, exactly, was behind the bill, only that it stemmed from Gabriele's FOI challenge in Stamford.

Democrats, led by Gov. Dannel Malloy, dominate state government. They also dominated Stamford government for many years, including 1995-2009, when Malloy was mayor.

Bill 1148 would have allowed the leaders of a government body -- it didn't matter how many, as long as they were leaders -- to meet in private. Sounding like city representatives in Stamford, Senate Democrats said the bill was needed because, to get things done in government, leaders must negotiate in private.

During public hearings in Hartford, proponents of open government spoke vehemently against Bill 1148. Not one Senate Democrat stepped forward to speak in favor of it.

Then The Advocate and other media outlets started calling state representatives to ask why they thought it was a good idea to allow government leaders to conduct the people's business in private.

Mysteriously, Democrats announced the next day that they would not have time to take up Bill 1148 in the Senate, and it died.

That was in April. Seven months later, David Martin was elected mayor of Stamford. Martin refused to meet behind closed doors with the eight leaders of the Board of Representatives.

Then board leaders, after two years of claiming they are not a committee and that private meetings are needed to dispense with bureaucratic "weeds," said they would no longer meet outside the public eye.

"I'm tired of driving up to Hartford" for FOI challenges, said Randall Skigen, a key defender of the meetings who is in his second term as board president.

But Skigen did not want to give up the meetings entirely. So he proposed changing board rules.

To do it, Skigen needed 21 votes. At the board's Feb. 10 meeting, one representative, Kieran Ryan, spoke. Ryan said he opposes the rule change because the leadership committee only duplicates the Steering Committee, which is the true gatekeeper of the board's work.

There was no other public debate. Then, for two hours, Democrats and Republicans talked privately in their separate caucuses, which political parties are allowed to do under FOI law. When they came out of caucus, 25 representatives voted for Skigen's change.

So the governing body of Stamford has a new rule. Here's where the logic gets fuzzy.

The leaders' private meetings were taking place just before the public meetings of the Steering Committee, which decides the items that representatives will take up each month. The fear among critics has been that the eight leaders, who are all members of the Steering Committee anyway and head several other of the board's key committees, have significant influence over city government.

To fulfill his promise of ending the private meetings, Martin asked whether he could talk with leaders during the public meeting of the full 19-member Steering Committee.

Skigen said no, that would be inappropriate. The mayor, as head of the executive branch of city government, cannot interfere with the legislative branch, Skigen said. When Martin appeared before Steering, some members "felt pressured by his presence," Skigen said.

But it's OK, under the new rule, for Martin to address the eight leaders. No pressure there, apparently.

The new rule does not say leaders must keep minutes and the meetings will be videotaped, but Skigen told The Advocate in January that would happen.

The change does not create a "committee" of leaders, which would trigger FOI requirements. But it does claim the FOI exception that allows public officials to discuss certain topics in executive session, or behind closed doors.

"So there is a regular meeting of the same people before the whole body meets? I've never heard of a municipal governing body having that many people meet regularly in that way, except in caucuses," said James Smith, president of the Connecticut Council on Freedom of Information, a nonprofit group that works to protect public access to government.

It sounds "a little confounding," Smith said.

"They can't say, `We are public, but we're not a committee covered by FOI, but we can go into executive session under FOI,'" Smith said. "That ought be part of Joseph Heller's `Catch 22,'" the satirical novel about the contradictory, circular logic used to justify bureaucratic actions.

The fact is that board leaders must post their meetings, open them to the public and record the minutes, said Thomas Hennick, public information officer for the FOI Commission. And they may enter executive session only under FOI restrictions.

"They can call themselves whatever they want, but in essence they have a subcommittee of the Board of Representatives," Hennick said. "What they are doing now is following the law. Hats off to them."